American industry has been receiving significant hands-on direction from Democrats and Republicans for quite some time now. Every few years, someone looks at the underwhelming results of this economic maneuvering and insists that real “industrial policy” has never been truly tried.

The truth is that the Left’s call for a “mission-oriented” state and the Right’s yearning for a nationalist industrial revival may sound different, but they share the same central conceit: that their own intentions can finally succeed where decades of government intervention have failed.

The latest person to revive this evergreen fantasy is Mariana Mazzucato, the Italian-born economist who has made a career out of championing an assertive, big-spending state as the engine of innovation. In a new interview with

See Full Page